Throughout my time at WeWork, the company’s office footprint doubled each year. We were opening dozens of locations each month, which meant we needed an army of architects, engineers, and interior designers. The tools used by interior designers and procurement were some of the most neglected, but we didn’t really know what they needed or how the tools could be improved. I proposed to our leadership that we kick off our research sprints with a deep-dive into the interior design & procurement process, and they agreed.
We put together a sprint team of engineers and product managers that would be working on the new tool, then partnered with them on interviews and observation, and led synthesis sessions to understand the overarching themes and opportunities that emerged. What we found was depressing, but not unexpected; interior architects and designers were spending more than a third of their time cutting and pasting rows from one spreadsheet to another in order to “order” furniture for their projects, and then because of inaccuracies with our warehouse data they were being forced to replace items that were out of stock with new ones, using the same process. If we could help fix this workflow, we could add 33% capacity to the designers and give them an actually user-friendly experience along the way.
I partnered with one of the designers on my team to bring this project to life. Thanks to the clarity we got from our observations and interviews in the research sprint, we knew a lot about the current process, how it failed its users, and ideally what the process might be. However, it was complex; we had to essentially create an “online shopping” experience, allowing designers to browse, view, and “order” furniture from warehouses around the world, and then we had to give them a supercharged “cart” that would allow them to assign each chair, couch, and table to the right building, floor, and room so that it would be delivered correctly.
Our design process followed best practices; first starting with sketches, testing them with users, then iterating into wires and prototypes for more detailed feedback. As we became more familiar with the user needs, we encountered some tough but fun edge cases. For instance, interior designers wanted to be able to add custom or one-off furniture pieces into the database themselves so they could “assign” it to the proper room; we had to create a flow to let them input photos, product info, and auto-assign a relevant SKU to each new product. We also had to design for two totally different types of designers; those who preferred to make a “mood board” with most of the furniture they’d use, but wait to assign it until later, and others who preferred to assign every item as they went along.
In the end, we launched our first functional app via a hackathon, and gradually added in features as the squad grew. Furnish has now been embraced by the global Interior Design team, and is being extended to power our procurement and logistics teams as well.
Furnish showed me the deep value of research-led design and product thinking. Looking back on the process, I can chart a direct line from the opportunities and insights identified in the research sprint, through the early prototypes, and through the most recent iterations and new features. As with all products, there are always new needs and business priorities, but we started with a strong foundation, and it showed.